I started a few days ago, and I've made some decent progress. I've got a level 64 Shadow Knight Reaver Rathdaar. I also got a level 30 necromancer named Rayyak. I'm open to build suggestions, and as far as gear goes, I'm making use of what I have. I'm leaning towards Necromancer being better than Shadow Knight IMO simply because they don't require uber gear to do their damage. Drops aren't excessively rare in this game, but you could very easily hit a 10-20 level streak of finding no weapon upgrades. Which is what happened to me on my Shadow Knight who was stuck with using an Executioner's Axe until nearly level 60. And that's a really crummy weapon in Nightmare.

Are there particular spots that are better to grind for drops than others? I've more or less been chaining mobs, but they stop at some point due to me killing the mob before I pull another one, which is the only cause for chains ending. I've got sustainable HP/Mana pools on both my characters.

Also, is it just me or is the Necromancer's pet a whole lot better than the Shadow Knights? It not only does a bit more damage, but it appears better at getting aggro as well, which is one of the reason's I've invested in it early on. I've done chains where my Necromancer took very little damage because the skele was getting 75%+ of the aggro. My Skele pet is level 29 with 5500ish HP, so its not gonna die, ever.

I've been saving Harm Touch on my SK, which hits 3 targets @ level 20 for annihilating spell spammers which hit like a bus. I got ambushed by 3 necros + pets, and 2 got taken out with 1 harm touch and the other was hit with fear. Saved my bacon in a very dangerous spot. Had to act quickly, because if I got hit with fear, it would have been certain death. Also, if you're running substandard gear on a SK, raising heat blood to level 20 for the +15% physical damage, stacked with Shadow Vortex's +10% makes your enemies take 25% more damage. Also its a pretty strong DoT when buffed up and supplements your lack of melee damage if your weapon is junk.

The Necro's pet is meant to be better than the SKs by design. The SK is a hybrid between the Warrior and the Necromancer and as such it gets weaker versions of some of their abilities as well as a few abilities unique to the SK, such as Harm Touch and some of the Debuff/Buff spells.

As far as gear is concerned I've found it's best to just push as far as you can. If you really, REALLY need gear, you can either farm Nimgaul or a similar zone from the difficulty below the one you're on, or get to the furthest boss you can kill and reset your game after each kill. Other than that, and including that, it's all RNG. You did luck out with a Ribcracker there, though. That weapon is pretty solid for quite some time.

In my experience I would pick one character to focus on getting into Hell. Once you have Hell Nimgaul on farm you can grind gear and complete entire sets for any alt you could ever desire in mere hours. Twink gear makes the game substantially easier. My Ranger will likely be my third character to reach end game and right now I can swarm chains of full groups of mobs and mostly just have to spam my D key to keep them coming as my auto attack/lightning procs murder everything but that's mostly because I'm in pretty silly gear for the level.

Glad you're liking it though over all. I know I am too, 5 toons in. Good luck on the quest for them gears

Yeah, after I got that Rib Cracker + upgraded it I've been wrecking faces. I'm hoping that gets me into hell mode the same way an executioner's axe got me through normal. I'm probably gonna switch my build around and drop heat blood and buff gasping frenzy to 20. Leave harm touch at 20 so I have an "oh shit" button.

I figured out that the best way to get resists, is just upgrade your armor. Although upgrading them to 10 doesn't seem viable unless you plan on keeping it for awhile. The shoulders and armor on my SK are probably gonna last me into hell mode, so they're next on the upgrade list.

Yeah, especially since the nerf to gold drops/sell prices you have to be stingy with upgrades until you have some really nice stuff you're gonna hold onto for a bit.

Yeah I toggle drops to discard anything less than Unique & exceptional quality. I've almost never seen any decent rares, and really good rares are likely to be considerably rarer than the rarest unique. Its like this in most loot games, D2, D3, PoE. I usually got spammed with so many junk rares that I got tired of playing inventory management with items I didn't even care about. I don't really waste my time selling items anymore. I used to vendor combo un ID'd rares for bonus orbs in PoE because of my lack of confidence in the game's RNG to actually give me a rare that was non-junk status. By looking at other player's gear, its almost entirely uniques/set items/legendaries, so I'm probably not the only one who thinks rares = junk in this game. Maybe rares need to be buffed a little, or at least increase the odds of more favorable combos occurring. This can be done by removing some lower level mods spawning on higher level items.

PLEASE DO THIS MAELFYN! I love the thrill of the hunt with bis rares

I feel like some stats in general are superfluous and could stand to see the edge of the axe.

I got a question, does "expand bank" get you an entire row of slots, or just 1 slot?

An entire row, which is 9 slots.

The problem with buffing rares is...

1. They can be worn at level 1
2. They sell for the most gold

So it's a point of concern to buff them. I could possibly make the max values higher for some key stats... maybe!

I think the minimum values would be nicer C:

Make them worn only by lvl 90, how to do this? Remove lvl 0 rare drop for hell difficulty, copy them, make buff lvl 90 version. Reduce their gold price.

I think a design limitation to powerful rares is that most are worthless because the stats are completely random. This forces you to sift through a lot of crap, hoping to find that golden piece where RNGesus smiled upon you. You're looking at adding a lot of downtime examining drops if you make them BiS.

Add sell all function, reduce rare drop rate, increase lowest number for stats.

And for balancing gold, you can always buff gold drops from killing mobs.

Also to reduce the frustration when dealing with items, make inventory client side, with server checks, if something goes bad, it is reverted, but it doesn't have to wait for server response every time. Also, bank tabs would help

Path of Exile and Diablo 3 both include systems to allow players to spend resources to make rares stronger by rerolling unwanted stats.

In Path of Exile, they have various currency items that can be consumed to reroll aspects of an item.

In Diablo 3, they have the mystic that will let you reroll one dud stat. The stats are also organized clearly so you can easily see when you've found an item with 3 out of 4 good primary stats.

Either solution or another one entirely would require a redesign of how rares are rolled and appear in your interface.

For some reason i hate stat re rolling, sure enchant them, upgrade them etc, but roll stats? The kills the whole purpose of random stats..

D2 also allowed you to reroll items and upgrade them to exceptional/elite versions. Involved horadric cube, gems, and runes iirc.

Yeah that's why i stopped playind d2, when i saw how i can just put gems in item and boom, awesome item..

I just thought of an idea for organizing rares btw, can you make it so a client can read item stats and make a configuration in settings like:
If an item has X or more number of X1,X2,X3,X4,X5 stats, highlight it! Adding a glow or an image to the icon so you can instantly see that it's the item you want.

So for example, if rares have both ice damage, crit chance, and crit damage, they glow.


If adding glow or image is too hard, you can command game to give you a popup or a message or something.

That would be tricky. It could possibly indicate the number of properties on a rare item when it drops.

Ye instant discard for rares that have less than certain amount of stats is a small bandage fix that could work, i got some more ideas ill make a thread xD

With regards to pets:

After leveling eight or nine characters to 97, I honestly don't even bother using pets
half the time. The only worthwhile pet is enchanter charming (bards don't count).
I've read some consider the dps is broken, though I think it brings enchanters dps more
in line with other classes. The best part of charm pets is actually --trivializing-- the whole
chain mechanic.

But specifically non-charm pets, even fully talented, are negligible damage. Ideally it's best to just consider
them analogous to low-damage over time spell. Admittedly I have not experimented with high conjuration
gearing, etc. to buff damage to pets but unless it scales exponentially I don't see it doing much.

They feel like damage shields in their current state. Twenty-five points of thorns on a creature
that has 150k hps and only hits once every three seconds is weak.

Also, I fully support "Sell All" function.

What is it about rares that you find more fun or compelling than unique and set items?

Thrill of the hunt, i never know what i will get and i can always get better. With uniques and set items i can look on wiki and say, kay i'll just play until i get those. Done? K nothing to play for now.


But with rares it's like.. See wiki, ok, so there's no best item. Play, get good item, be super happy, feel like high until get next good item, crazy happy again. Have really good items, still able to play and maybe find even better. Also, randomization encourages you to take different build paths in case you get really good different path rare.

Kinda gives me an idea. Maybe allow a random enchant on unique/set items. This would add one rare property to a unique/set/legendary. Basically adds a RNG lottery aspect to otherwise static items. Could be a great gold sink.

That's good too, but i dislike the "gold sink" part, you mean re rolling the stat with gold? Maybe if it was only allowed to do 3 times on each item? Otherwise it won't be random and it will just be a gold sink until you get what you want. I made a thread with lots of gold sinks btw Dunno if it's it's too complicated though.

Actually a good idea for gold sink is indentify! You can indentify a unique/set item and it gets a random bonus, boom rng and gold sink o_o